Sunday, April 28, 2013

Show me the evidence

Critics are fond of saying that there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, "Show me the evidence!" Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn't know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet).

In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast.

So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi and psi-related topics, all published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these papers were published after the year 2000. Most report experimental studies or meta-analyses of classes of experiments. I will continue to add to this page and flesh it out, including links to recent or to especially useful ebooks. This page may eventually become annotated, then multithreaded and hyperlinked, and then morph into a Wiki.

Update (November 5, 2013): Here's a link to another good web site with links to scholarly articles on parapsychology, on Carlos Alvarado's blog.

226 comments:

Usually they are not satisfied with evidence. They want extraordinary evidence for what they regard as extraordinary claims. I usually respond by pointing out just how extraordinary the claims of the materialist mainstream are. Certain regularities in our experience of the world are held (i) to describe all there really is and (ii) to account for the very experience from which the regularities are abstracted. How extraordinary that something can (i) exist by itself, out of relation to any consciousness or experience, and (ii) exist for someone! How can something that exists by itself be experienced? How can there be consciousness of what exists by itself? Even more extraordinary is the claim that what exists by itself is adequately described by mathematical symbols and equations. Isn’t mathematics a creation of the human mind? And is not this mind a creation of matter and evolution? How extraordinary, then, that matter should be governed by mathematical laws! And how extraordinary that mathematical laws describing certain regularities in our experience should be the very laws governing all that really exists! Where is the extraordinary evidence for all that?

We had a similar attempt over at the Skeptiko-forums (The Links/Download section), where we also included some articles, books and videos on consciousness in addition to psi. But what you have assembled here is much more comprehensive regarding the psi part. It will without a doubt become the first place people go to do their homework from now on.

Evidence can be either positive or negative. I list both to avoid the problem of selective reporting.

From the super-skeptical perspective there is *no* positive evidence for psi. That is clearly not true, as demonstrated by some of the articles on that page. But it is also true that sometimes evidence is not found, and it is only proper to reveal that too. To me the "failed" studies just indicate the obvious -- that we don't (yet) understand all of the variables involved in demonstrating psi effects.

"To me the "failed" studies just indicate the obvious -- that we don't (yet) understand all of the variables involved in demonstrating psi effects."

Sounds a bit like the way Hyman explains away the positive results, but in reverse. (The positive results are probably the product of unknown variables, and the "failed" results are evidence against psi).

Have you not perhaps just taken a somewhat unfalsifiable position? How can the positive results be seen as evidence for psi but negative results simply are evidence "that we don't (yet) understand all of the variables involved in demonstrating psi effects."? Shouldn't negative results just be taken as evidence against the psi hypothesis?

> Shouldn't negative results just be taken as evidence against the psi hypothesis?

Before the advent of meta-analysis, there was no clear answer to this question, and Hyman and others used that uncertainty as justification for their continuing doubt.

But now we know that the positive vs. negative ratio is asymmetrical and strongly in favor of positive, using either frequentist or Bayesian methods. This is why I think that "failed" experiments are useful to study because given the evidence in favor of psi, when it does not appear in a (well-designed, well-conducted) study, then we need to understand why.

It won't matter to the hard cases, you can present them with the most massive body of evidence and they'll put their hands over their ears, shut their eyes and pretend it's not there. But most people aren't so unreasonable. Or at least a lot aren't.

THere's three referenced articles in this video, I think you have one of them referenced (standish). One is Fenwick and another Mexican. Wondering if you can provide all three references, of validate themits about 35 minutes and on in the video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5yHOVp2TWI

What concerns me is that if you covince most sceptics through the means of mathematical statistics that psi is real this phenomena will become common knowledge which is very dangerous. People will start using it for their purpose which may include attacking someone. Have you heard about a magic spell called Pulsa Dinura that is used by Orthidox Jews? It almost killed Ariel Sharon. Our average Richar Dawkins fan will turn to popular occultism such as Chaos Magic to gain profit. Magic is of course a difficult discipline but with practice it gets better. So it that really necessary to provide scientific evodence?

> this phenomena will become common knowledge which is very dangerous ...

For practically everyone except a small percentage of entrenched skeptics, psi is already common knowledge.

To avoid studying this topic because someone might abuse it is a complaint that could be said about virtually every topic that science has ever studied. I believe that knowledge is always better than ignorance.

Of course, with great knowledge comes great power, and with great power comes even greater responsiblity (to paraphase Spiderman). How we use that power is a measure of wisdom and maturity.

During the Double Split Experiment, the outcome is a collapsed probability. And the outcome is effected by the observation (observer). Can we know something more about the observer to understand why the wave collapses to one outcome? How entangled is the observer to that which is being observed?

I have yet to read the article about the couple that meditated prior to the psi experiment. Does meditation increase entanglement? Can this entanglement be measured? How does it effect the outcome psi effect?

How would measured entanglement tease out differences in statistical measurements. That is, would you be able to say that the reasons for our results were that less entangled folks had poorer psi results?

Dean, I read with some interest the query about whether widespread activation of remote viewing and ESP might create positive or negative scenarios. I was once fortunate enough to spend over two years with a group of incredibly gifted people with exceptional psi abilities. The training was intense, and I saw from first-hand experience that all people are capable of developing high degrees of clairvoyance. That wasn't actually the main purpose of the group - it was emotional healing - but the psi capacities were developed as part of the process. I developed a high degree of clairvoyance myself from the process (though I was already quite psychic beforehand). What I learned was that there are indeed some very notable problems that can occur where everyone in a community is effectively able to read minds. It is far more challenging and terrifying than you might imagine, as it effectively makes the ego completely transparent, exposes all the lies and deceptions and petty manipulations that typically occur wherever human beings gather together in numbers. It was extremely confronting, and took incredible amounts of personal courage and commitment to see through. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything, as it taught more than I think a thousand lifetimes of typical human experience could provide. However, I might also add that I would be very reluctant to go through it again. It really was incredibly stressful. My experience taught me that there are very few human beings who are ready for complete psychic transparency. It fully exposes the shadow - and the ego can be completely destabilised. I have never taken drugs or ayahuasca, but when I read about the experiences of people who do - such as Graham Hancock and the London Real Podcast guys - and the terror that ensues when the shadow is brought into consciousness - I know exactly what they are talking about! I wrote a semi-autobiographical account of my experience here (http://ow.ly/kMx5Y) if anyone is interested. The reason why it is not fully-autobiographical is because I don't want to provide any names or precise details, in order to respect the privacy of the people involved.

Marcus, interestingly me and some friends who are into contemplative practice were talking about similar issues just a few hours ago.

Most minds are full of uncontrolled urges, emotions, calculating agendas and so on. It's a sad state for us humans to be in, but it's the norm. Once the ability to see all this starts to manifest, the need to be tolerant, understanding and nonjudgmental also becomes increasingly important.

I think it was B. Alan Wallace who said that if suddenly all people on the planet got a typical cartoon bubble above their head that showed a live stream of what they were actually thinking, society as a whole would collapse instantly. I think he's right. People can not handle that unless some seriously deep housecleaning is done.

Maybe I'll have a go at your book. It's interesting to see what others that are traveling along a similar path experience and learn.

The key word is "suddenly." If practically anything suddenly happened it would seriously disrupt society (e.g., 911). But gradually is another matter. There have been all sorts of tremendously radical changes to modern society over the past century, but things are still hanging together fairly well.

Dean, I do agree with that. If it is possible to extrapolate an individual's personal development (once he/she is walking the contemplative path) on to society, there most likely will be a pretty rough transition period. I'm not saying that is bad. Just that it is though.

Hopefully the end results would a planetary mindset that drastically changed for the better.

Ken Wilbur speaks of the tipping point required to shift paradigms. I remember when cashew butter was only what organic farmers ate. Though tempeh is not widely known yet, most health food took a while to be accepted.

Another thought and question related to Dean's talk about the Yoga.

http://www.askimo.com/pages/PlayVideo.aspx?vid=4614

How can we differentiate the "energy" of meditation from the energy of physics? It is like there is the western and eastern description of energy. And psi works even with electromechanical shielding.

Yes! Dean, I do believe that the shadow - collectively and individually, will become transparent, and the process needs to be slow. There is only so much the psyche can handle at one time. Anyway, I realise this is now somewhat off topic.

Thanks for your perspective, Tor. Yes, there are plenty of different introspective and healing modalities which bring the shadow into the light. So lots of people are now understanding these things.

"Chronic pain is highly prevalent in the general population. Adequate clinical management of chronic pain is an ongoing challenge and a purely pharmaceutical approach has proven inadequate. We investigated the efficacy of external qigong [Spring Forest Qigong technique] as an adjunctive treatment for chronic pain."

Conclusions:

"Subjects with chronic pain who received external qigong experienced reduction in pain intensity following each qigong treatment. This is especially impressive given the long duration of pain (>5 years) in the most of the participants," writes lead author Ann Vincent, MD, MBBS, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.

While I applaud you on this listing, it unfortunately does not effectively deal with the real problem of pseudo-skeptic's fundamentalism and easy willingness to "move the goalposts" to protect their ersatz religion I call "Scientism."

Provide the proof they demand and they'll move the goalposts and demand more. Provide extra proof and they'll still demand more. You can't use science to change the minds of people who are stuck in a religion.

The solution, IMO, is to prevent moving the goalposts by beginning with consequences. When the debunkers, say, "Prove it," respond by asking, first, "OK, what will you accept as proof AND what will you do when I provide that proof?"

It is only when they cannot move the goalposts that Psi will become accepted among those mainstream scientists who have been too cowardly to stand up to the vociferous pseudo-skeptics.

Donald, as I have stated before, I think generally that people interested in parapsychology, psi and the like spend too much time worrying about skeptics. The main purpose of the evidence page surely is for reference for people who are interested in the debates and the evidence, not to change the thinking of fundamentalists. The healthiest attitude is that unless you are someone who has to actively engage them - like Dean - then just let them be.

I am pondering what the point with this "search" for a "proof" that not everything is yet known could be.a) once "proven" that some of these, mostly unrelated phenomena, "exist", something will change to the better, humans will begin to think and feel in a way that makes this life worthwhile?b) these phenomena will continue to have zero impact even if they exist (maybe they had more impact long ago in daily life, but had no impact on direction of development), meaning one can as well believe in God or whatever construction of choice, it absolutely does not matter?

Mainstream science does not have this problem, even if it oftentimes is totally "unscientific", something is produced that can be used somehow and the investigated phenomena are so robust that even science sometimes is able to reveal and make use of them.

So it just might boil down to that "para-science" is equally flawed as "real" science (even if intentions might be less ego-centric), but dealing with phenomena that have no impact on what life currently is while making big claims, as an explanation why it is not mainstream regardless existing "proof".

I was just reading about the belowstated formula which describes the probability of success in magic(psi) operations, created by Peter J Carroll and now I think that if we study the parameters of the formula in terms of neurobiology and create a device which registers the activity of our brains and automatically measures the quality of our magical operations, then we would have a tool to "attack" certain chaotic masses of probability with great precision.M = G x L(1-A)(1-R)All factors are between 0 and 1.M equals the force of your magic. Which is dependent upon your G (Gnosis) and L (magical Link) multiplied by two negative factors. (Things working against you). Your conscious awareness of the desired result (1-A) and your subconscious resistance to doing magic (1-R. This particular formula can be of course be improved upon, especially when we consider that it doesn't describe the complexity of physical event we want to achive.

I think this list has been long overdue. I once intended to create one comprising all the books by scientists who investigated mediums in the heyday of Spiritualism. In this sense, Dean, have you ever stumbled across one of those by chance?If you are interested, I would recommend to start with "Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism" by Sir William Crookes, or "Ghosts in Solid Form" by Gambier Bolton. The two were not spiritualists, by the way, even though some people claim that.Maybe this question seems over the top, but I ask it anyway. I wonder if you or someone else at the IONS has ever thought about experimenting with table tilting, or sitting in the dark for one hour once a week to try to develop psycho-physical phenomena?I know people in my country (Germany) who have successfully done it.

Some people have asked what's the purpose of this type of research? One answer, besides the basic science urge to explore the unknown, is that it's important because if we don't understand our essential nature then how can we hope to promote a world that is more life affirming?

That is, if we believe we live in a meaningless, mindless universe, which is the prevailing scientific paradigm in the developed world today, then we are more likely to treat each other like meaningless objects, and then the only thing that matters is short term hedonism. That belief leads to virtually all of the problems faced by humanity today.

But what if the belief is wrong? What if mind and brain are not the same thing. What if there is something profoundly important about the nature of consciousness that science has overlooked? What then?

I agree Dean. The research is profoundly important, touching on the very meaning of life and the universe itself. I recall Susan Blackmore writing an article saying that psi has nothing to teach us about consciousness, or anything else for that matter. I find that position almost mindbogglingly unimaginative. The potential implications are massive.

The other factor is that you are investigating cognitive functions that are genuine, but not acknowledged. As you have argued, it is just a matter of time before the research bears rich fruit.

Dean, in the "SHOW ME" page, in the topic "Physiological correlations at a distance" you didn't mentioned a failed replication. The article is "Correlations between the EEGs of two spatially separated subjects − a replication study" and you can find it here: .http://ejp.wyrdwise.com/EJP%20v23-2.pdf.The next article "Dyadic EEG correlations re-examined: A commentary on the replication study by W. Ambach" is very important too to be forgotten. It says:."Reviewing results of our own replication study (Wackermann et al., 2004), and taking into account the results reported by Ambach even without post hoc corrections, it is highly doubtful that there is anything such as a ‘real’ effect. This negative evidence arises from the remarkable lack of consistency, in terms of direction and spatial distribution of the effect measures, and is thus based more on a visceral feeling for ‘what is like real physiology’ than on formal statistical inference." [...]There are no signs of real progress. May each individual researcher draw her/his conclusions from this observation. We take the lesson seriously and turn to more productive research topics, not to spend our lives in a heroically ‘relentless’ but ultimately unproductive search.".Don't you think that these 2 articles shows we don't have any good evidence of a paranormal effect by this kind of research? I don't know any successful replication since then. And 5 years passed since then. This is much time....I hope you put these two articles in the SHOW ME page.

I will add these articles. While the EEG correlation studies do not seem to be working out, I emphasize "seem" because I am aware of two successful experiments, both conducted after the two articles mentioned above, and both by separate mainstream neuroscience labs in US universities. But neither study has been published because the authors are well aware of the controversial nature of this topic, and the sociopolitical consequences of reporting positive results. They have judged that it is just not worth rocking the boat at the present time. This is a pity because it adds to a positive filedrawer effect, and that filedrawer will remain shut until the taboo breaks.

The main problem here is lack of people who have the funds and interest in conducting these studies in the first place, and who are also prepared to go public with their results in an academic climate where you have more to lose than to gain.

So Dean, do you think the EEG correlation experiments provide possible refutation of the Libet free will experiments, given that the EEG correlation experiments indicate that the "receiver"'s mind is stimulated about 1/100th of a second before the first person is exposed to the stimulus?

If I Am correct, the brain reacts about 2/100ths of a second before the person in the Libet experiment is consciously aware of making a decision.

The EEG experiment suggests that consciousness is not strictly bound not only by space, but by linear time as well. If true, this would throw a huge spanner in the works of one of the foundational principles of modern neuroscience and psychology, as the idea of free will is almost a taboo in itself.

Of course the other major issue with the whole free will taboo is seeing theorists tying themselves in knots to ensure that consciousness and intention are not seen to in any way initiate brain activity - as that would imply that mind and brain are not the same thing.

I suspect that in a few short years from now all this free will taboo stuff will look embarrassingly myopic, not to mention hopelessly wrong.

Dear Dr Radin,I'm interested in the problem of consciousness survival. I can't understand what could be the role of ESP. Dr Van Lommel often uses examples of ESP to corroborate the theory of a quantum mind (based on ORCH-or)which could exist without a brain (entangled information) even after death. On the other hand Chris Carter ("Science and the afterlife experience") does everything to rule out ESP hypothesis. ESP in fact in often used by skeptics in order to explain away NDE veridical information and contacts with discarnate people. Do you think that ESP rules out the survival hypothesis? Or maybe it just gives some kind of evidence to quantum soul theory? Thanks in advance for your answer. Greetings from Poland!

Marcus -- yes, the EEG presentiment experiment suggests that mind is not generated by the brain, at least not in the classical physical sense that the neurosciences have assumed. I suspect that our notion of what brain is, in a physical sense, will be changing in the not too distant future, and that will shed new light on what minds are capable of.

Malgosia -- ESP is relevant to the survival question because it suggests that brain and mind are not identical.

However, we do not know that consciousness is possible without some sort of physical substrate, whether that is provided by the brain or by something else.

As our understanding of the brain evolves from classical to quantum to post-quantum physics, we may find that consciousness does require a brain to produce human-type awareness. But I also suspect that some sort of inherent awareness permeates the universe, and when that awareness resonates with a suitable host, whatever that host may be, then it can become self-aware.

I understand the arguments and am familiar with the literature on psi and survival, and I am not yet convinced of survival of the personality.

Mindy - I've read his book and will be interested to learn more during his talk. Much of Alexander's NDE is consistent with classical descriptions of NDEs, but given that we don't know definitively how to explain these experiences, the best we can do for now is compare subjective reports. On that basis, it is certainly an interesting phenomenon.

Thanks a lot for your answer! The interesting fact about Eben Alexander's experience is that he didn't have any memory of his life(maybe it's the effect of the absence of a healthy brain cortex - substrate to resonate with). The nice thing in NDE's is the strange sense of time and space. Even if it could be only a brain based phenomenon, it could give us some sort of personal "heaven" and "eternity" lasting only few minutes for the ones who observe us

Brain-correlation studies also not on Dean's show me page include the following. All of the studies listed below show a positive effect, by the way. The Richards 2005 study is especially important, and I hope Dean soon adds it to his list.

Persinger, M. A., Koren, S. A, & Tsang, E. W. (2003). Enhanced power within a specific band of theta activity in one person while another receives circumcerebral pulsed magnetic fields: a mechanism of influence at a distance? Perceptual and Motor Skills, 97, 877-894.

Regarding listing additional EEG correlation studies: The evidence page is not intended to be comprehensive. Its purpose is to answer the "there's no evidence" criticism with freely downloadable full articles.

A truly comprehensive listing would run into literally thousands of articles. And not only do I not have pdfs of all of those articles, I also don't have the time or patience to even begin to list them all.

Hello，Mr Dean , You must remember this sentence----“the sigmage would be divided by sqrt (16 ) = 4 and would become 9.5/4 = 2.4”---which written in I J Good's review for your book "the conscious universe". Did Good make a mistake ? I think it should be like this: The sigamge(sample standard deviation) would be divided by sqrt(16)=4. And actually the z score would be divided by sqrt(16)=4 also and become 9.5/4 = 2.4 , right? And the sigmage(sample standard deviation) in this case is about 2.6 (my approximate guess to Figure 6.2's ESP high security), right?

I really enjoyed Supernormal. I was pretty intrigued by the discussion in the book on Myers-Briggs types and the tendency of certain types (NFs) to be interested in psi or have their own experiences. (I myself am an INFP and match the description you put forth in your book for NF sorts).

Anyway, I threw together a rather simple poll over at the Skeptiko forum to see if there is any rough agreement with what you mention in your book. Thus far there are 22 responses - 16 of those who responded are NFs and the other 6 are NTs. There are no "S" types so far. It has been noted that at least a few of the NTs are sort of the "resident skeptics" on the board.

I thought this was interesting. The link to the poll can be found here: http://forum.mind-energy.net/skeptiko-podcast/5459-whats-your-type-personality-paranormal-experience.html

Question - I was wondering if experiments indicate the medium of telepathy. Is it simple electromagnetic wave? Or is it something else? That human perception can be "non-causal" (e.g., pre-cognition) does not rule out the possibility that mental communications are non-EM.

Given that experiments are performed in metal cages, the answer I am sure that the answer is available - but so far, I have not seen anything on this.

Experiments indicate that it is most unlikely that telepathy is "carried" via EM. But no other suitable carriers have been identified, so the idea of "sender" and "receiver" is also suspect. This is why I've toyed with a quantum entanglement model, as that does not require signal passing.

On the previous comment, referring to a comment in my book Supernormal, I should note that the Bayes Factor was about 18 million to one, but the odds against chance (based on overall Stouffer z score) was about 12 billion to one.

I find telling to compare the odds for Non-Local Perception of 12 billion to one against the chances of winning the Euromillion lotery jackpot, that has odds of 116,531,800 to one for an average gain of 47M€ (62 M$).

I compute that the current strength of evidences for Remote Viewing are almost equivalent to winning the jackpot 103 times.

Dr. Radin,I believe that the medium for telepathy involves the interaction between gravitational force fields and consciousness. I write about the events and ideas that led to this conclusion in my upcoming book, Seeking Sound Judgment, soon to be published by independent book publisher, All Classic Books. This explanation also accounts for a number of other so-called paranormal phenomena of which ample anecdotal (but no laboratory) evidence exists, e.g., reincarnation and astral travel.My book does not pretend to be scientific thesis, although I do have a Ph.D. in psychology. The book is a memoir that details paranormal experiences that occurred to me after dropping out of college. These experiences eventually led me to return to academia where I did research on how sounds affect emotions and developed my ideas on how to explain the phenomena that I experienced (i.e., telepathy, astral travel, and reincarnation).Sorry to run on like this. Please feel free to edit this as much as you like. You can learn a little about me at my website http://holisticemotivepractices.comW. Brian McPherson, Ph.D. brian@holisticemotivepractices.com

Methods have been developed to estimate the impact of publication bias in meta-analyses (e.g. the funnel plot). Applying those estimates to the known literature does not nullify the results.

There have been two, perhaps three known cases of fraud by investigators in parapsychology, and all of those cases were discovered by parapsychologists. This is far lower than in other areas of science. Fraud cannot plausibly explain the observed results.

The use of Occam's razor in this case is predicated on the assumption that current theories are sufficient to describe everything in the physical world. That is clearly incorrect because every 20 years textbooks have to be rewritten. Will we have a viable theory 20 years from now? I don't know, but the moment one allows theory to trump empirical facts, that's religion, not science.

The reason why large scale studies are not conducted is very simple: lack of funds. Large scale studies can be very expensive and funding for this area is nearly nonexistent.

For a start: Journal of Scientific Exploration, Journal of Parapsychology, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Explore: The Journal of Science and Health, NeuroQuantology, Journal of Nonlocality.

1- can you explain why telepathy is not an em wave and what experiments has been realised for demonstrate that?2- what anther explanations has been used to explain remote viewing when rv choose information from the future? is clear that can not be an em wave.hello from spain, and sorry for my engish

I do not feel that the following is possible at the moment but it would be extremely cool if your research could draw the attention of such luminaries as Daniel Kahnerman and Nassim Taleb. Just imagine how the whole body of the research could influence finance and exprert desicion making. Kahnerman believes that the only way to become expert is to observe regularities, then, he therefore concludes that it is impossible to become an expert in financial markets because they are unpredictable. Though, statistical tests that you present might indicate the possibility that one can become an expert and be a successful investor in complex non-linear systems like the world economy.

I noticed your interest in wiki publishing. I just received R. Sheldrake's newsletter...which discussed how...his wiki pages...were being edited to pieces by groups of skeptic-wiki-editors...a trend I first noticed a year ago while researching neuro folks. So...good luck with your wiki but you may need an army of folks to see you thru the intended harm of the militant-wiki-ists...lol...SAK

"But what is light really? Is it a wave or a shower of photons? There seems no likelihood for forming a consistent description of the phenomena of light by a choice of only one of the two languages. It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do." -- Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, pg. 262-263.

We are working with two systems that are complimentary and entangled. This is an idea put forth again by the book Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Spirituality.

A neat grant would be to explore this topic further or advance it - summarizing psi data - - or has this been done already - ? -

1) A responder to your article "Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern" stated that "quantum mechanics doesn't need any psychophysical ingredient to explain the measurement processes, and therefore parapsychologists shouldn't resort to the latter to support the possibility of psychokinesis, but search for more convincing explanations.": http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0804

Do you have an answer to this, or are you aware of other theoretical constructs for PK that are compelling?

2) From a preliminary investigation, it seems that Wolfgang Pauli believed that Quantum Physics had the explanatory power necessary to provide a factual explanation for Jungian synchronicities. I am hesitant to approach his correspondence with Jung, for the simple reason that it is voluminous and I have limited time. If you know of specific excerpts of relevance where he justifies himself, it would be greatly appreciated if you could post them or reference them.

Moreover, and much more importantly, for the benefit of all reading here, it would be greatly appreciated if you could help with the following:

1) Have there been advances in science since Pauli's time that confirm or refute his position? 2)What theoretical constructs support synchronicities?3) Is there an evidence base or strong sources for evidence for this phenomena occurring?

One person's opinion. Other physicists believe differently. There is no strong consensus about the proper interpretation of the quantum measurement problem among physicists who have focused on foundational issues in QM. The point of our studies is to bring empirical data to the debate rather than guesses and philosophical prejudices.

2) ... Wolfgang Pauli ... Jungian synchronicities

I recommend this book: "Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds"

A suggestion for increasing awareness is to update Wikipedia as it is an often reference tool. It seems to me that it is quite biased in its accounting of this field of study. You just need an account (from what I remember) to work on updating it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology

(P.S. thanks for the reading suggestion and all the journal references)

I've addressed criticisms of the ganzfeld and other meta-analyses in great detail in my books, and you can read some of the original journal articles on the "evidence page" I mentioned at the top of this thread. I've also stated my opinion about Wikipedia in this blog.

When working at the edge of the known there is plenty of room for a wide range of opinions, some of which are worth more than others. I've learned to pay close attention to constructive comments offered by scientists who have expertise in actually conducting and analyzing experiments. I pay far less attention to armchair critics.

Blissentia,I read Robert Carrol's critique on presentiment (since that is what I'm familiar with) and immediately got the impression that Carrol has zero experience in any mainstream science. Papers reporting odds against chance that Carrol mocks in presentiment are published all the time in mainstream fields as reports of significant effects. And Carrol astonishingly never appears to have figured out that automated random number generators were used to select stimuli saying, "The researchers might equally assume that the electrical resistance of skin in a subject or the blip of color on an fMRI caused the researcher to select the stimulus presented." This tells me he just skimmed through the papers, at best. Carrol does not have any scientific expertise and has no business judging the quality of scientific work in parapsychology. Yet I bet his screed will still be taken as Word of God on Wikipedia.

Mindy Block,I've tried fixing egregious errors on Wikipedia before and it's hopeless. Organized groups like "Guerilla Skeptics" and like-minded fanatics have abused the rules, made many of the parapsychology pages their personal fiefdoms, banned all pro-psi editors, and make sure any corrections never see the light of day. I think Wikipedia will end up being one of the last bastions of psi-denialism.

I think the psi taboo must eventually be broken by scientists speaking openly to colleagues about their interest in psi and even any personal psychic experiences. Unfortunately, the extremely competitive nature of academic research makes the situation into an enormous prisoner's dilemma. But I know that some scientists will realize that the original reason they gave up high-paying jobs and spent so many years struggling with little sleep through grad school was not to get a long publication list or fancy academic title but instead to learn how the Universe really works and to broaden human understanding of our world. This curiosity is ultimately what will batter down the psi taboo.

Hello Dean. I'm very interested in Your work. But in the same time I still retain good amount of scepticism. But not in a way that I would start to trample on everything I can't explain. Materialism is getting upper hand with new studies that put hard solid proofs. I wanted to ask You - Is there anything that You are really sceptical?

When it comes to my work I am skeptical about everything. Proper skepticism, meaning reasoned doubt (and not uncritical or uninformed denial, which is rife among so-called "skeptics") is a core strength of science and something I fully agree with.

Hansel's book is the first I read on parapsychology, when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I was immediately attracted to the idea that claims of psi could be put to the test, but I saw even then, without knowledge of the rest of the literature, that Hansel seemed determined to explain away any positive evidence.

Now that I've read a good deal of the rest of the literature, his approach seems transparently desperate.

Skepticism is a virtue. But when taken to extremes that same virtue can turn ugly and transform into a defense of dogma.

It's amazing looking here - Ulrich Mohrhoff is the first commenter here - this author wrote two articles, one in JCS and one in Physics Essays, refuting the objections to interactionism that is of great relevance in looking at this: http://thisquantumworld.com/PDF/Mohrhoff_PE.pdf, http://thisquantumworld.com/PDF/Mohrhoff_JCS.pdf

What I am looking for is a way to reconcile this interactionism with the filter theory expanded upon in "Irreducible Mind" that at present, I only have access to via google preview, with pan-psychism and the dual aspect monism discussed in the article "Dual-Aspect Monism a la Pauli and Jung", which apparently David Bohm also gave credence to: http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/dualaspect.pdf

If you had any pointers on where to look, it would be more than appreciated.

hmmm. I think you sent me the wrong link (above). This article is about intentionally enhanced chocolate on mood - which is intriguing since it's been a mainstay ever since ray suddenly died.... the darker the better....

So I am still looking for your reference on an intention imprinted electrical device - re. tiller.

P.S. now did ray entangle with you to send me the article on chocolate :)

There is one link in the new article that may be defamatory - it is "Victor J. Stenger also criticized the book as Radin did not perform the file-drawer analysis correctly, made fundamental errors in his calculations and ignored possible, non-paranormal explanations for the data": http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/meta-analysis_and_the_filedrawer_effect

Wikipedia was once a good idea that went terribly wrong. It has been hijacked by ideologues and apparently those in charge either don't care or don't know how to fix it. E.g., http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24613608.

If someone wants to try to tackle the trolls and sockpuppets that have made Wikipedia useless as a source of neutral information on virtually any controversial topic (science, politics, sports, etc.), go for it.

I added in the "Consciousness Studies" link below Dean's name. So far that has been overlooked. I also added this into parapsychology : "Parapsychologists study consciousness with respect to: telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation and apparitional experiences." So far that has stuck.

I just had a look at the wikipedia article. It appears that instead of having looked at the evidence, they have elected to write a negative article on the basis of people giving reviews that did not rate your books highly. Which seems on par to saying Shakespeare was an awful playwright because x and y say so.

I recommend that you pay attention to these suggestions, especially considering the current internet intellectual climate: http://subversivethinking.blogspot.com/2013/10/further-reflections-on-rupert-sheldrake.html

With regard to why I don't care to engage in screaming matches with pseudoskeptics, if modern scholarship is defined by reading free articles at random on the Internet, and scientific arguments are won by who screams the loudest, then I'm afraid the future of humanity is lost.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to conduct research and publish my results, and I'll leave the screaming to others who are more temperamentally suited to that sort of combat.

> What this means is that these ideas have pretty much no chance of being right even before we test them directly.

This statement and line of reasoning assumes that it is valid for theory to trump data. It isn't valid, at least not in a science worthy of that name. As I've repeatedly written, the instant that theory trumps data science collapses into religious dogma.

The data -- the empirical case in favor of psi -- is clear in my opinion. Replications rates are essentially the same, or better, than those observed in other, more traditional disciplines.

To explain psi may well require an expansion of our understanding of the physical world. This does not mean that well-established physical models are false, or that textbooks will have to be thrown away. But it does mean that our conception of physicality needs to become more comprehensive. This shouldn't be frightening to contemplate because history tells us that science has always evolved by discovering that what was once thought to be a "fundamental" law was actually a special case.

One of these days a theory will be published that comfortably accommodates the existing structure of knowledge and also predicts and explains psi. I anticipate that this will happen in 2 to 5 years based on a number of new ideas converging from physics, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and computer science. I would not have thought we were as close to such a theory even a few months ago. But there are new developments under way that look more promising than anything I've previously seen. It's premature to say anything more about this.

Sean Carrol et al. would be wise the remember the example of the many physicists at the end of the 19th century who believed that physics was just about complete - except for a few minor odds and ends which needed tying up. Then came the dual revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. Inconvenient experimental evidence which doesn't fit current theory may be the spark which ignites the next scientific revolution.

Another thought on this comment: "I am interested in the skeptical objections to psi, and seeing if they are sound or not."

That's a perfectly valid request, and in response I've written three books and many articles. Many of the articles can be obtained for free, and all of my books are in (inexpensive) paperback and ebook form, and readily available worldwide.

I hope you can understand why I'm not interested in repeating everything I've already written in a blog that maybe a hundred people read. If an opportunity comes along to write for a blog with a million readers, then it would be worth my time.

Dean please contact me. Its about your 6th sense work, and I have important information on your work. It involves evidence alongside the theory. Contact me on facebook. Corey ford, in livingston texas. The one with the black marines shirt on. And although I'm young, I wish to help. The information is firsthand evidence by me.

Corey - my email address is dean at noetic dot org, which can be found on the IONS (ions.org) website and elsewhere. Because of the volume of emails I receive I often forward emails to my research assistants, so don't be offended if I don't personally reply.

If the mind is too intellectualized along narrow lines, it's an impediment to the emergence and proper appreciation of psi-faculties.

Highly educated scientists with well-developed logical faculties that're stuck in a tiny spatio-temporal circle as it were may increasingly be interested in psi-phenomena since the mind in its exteriorized functional mode is always seeking out new thrills of the sensational kind that lack depth. It's a nice diversion from the mundane task of dealing with never-ending routines using equations and lab techniques, while the essence of what constitutes the the nature of reality or the nature of being eludes them. Why, they wouldn't even know what makes them act compulsively or what brings on mania or fits of egoism.

Everyone thoughtful is fast realizing the limitations of the reductionist method. Occam's Razor seeks out the most simple explanation but that explanation should be capable of accounting for every known and unknown facet of the entity/system studied.

The right balance between intellectualism, free thinking, practicality and intuition prevents one from becoming an extremist of sorts - science only deals with matter and its application in the form of technology, while mysticism exclusively or largely deals wit psychical phenomena and how such psychical phenomena of the paranormal kind could affect other psychologies or impact the so-called ineluctable laws of matter.

One without the other is incomplete.

A synthesis, even if it be a weak hypothesis with an extremely narrow range of testability, is the need of the hour.

Development of the higher psychic faculties is the preserve of the gifted few. Not everyone who takes to yoga is a yogi and even if one in the yoga sees some inner lights and hears subtle sounds it means very little with the danger of turning a megalomaniac or of one getting "insanely" caught up in these surface grooves remains high.

At the same time, it must be noted that one should not equate mysticism with spiritualism for the simple reason that one can open up in consciousness to a certain degree with manifestation of certain paranormal powers without ever reaching up to the truths of existence. For example, a mystic can be compassionate and cruel at the same time and it may not come as a surprise that the compassion of most mystics or prophets is conditional, a kind of cheap bargaining - you accept my teachings or you genuflect before my God and I'll be kind you otherwise you're cursed or I'll kill you - as seen in the expositions of the various scriptures.

True compassion, true empathy, true detachment, true selflessness, true forgiveness, true love and other noble virtues are attributes of the higher ranges of conscious existence that stand aloof from crude occult manifestations that most people down the ages mistake for the spiritual.

People, even the most highly educated among us, love cheap sensationalism and so miss the woods for the tress.

While I appreciate your commitment to testing psi phenomena using scientific methods, nevertheless skeptics may remain unconvinced or label your interest "woo woo" or "quackery" since the statistically significant evidence presented in cases of human intent causing wave function collapse, in influencing flipping of coins and in altering output of random number generators can be cogently explained using mundane logic without bringing in outlandish inferences.

Intent in this sense is simply an act of directing focused energy at some thing which one wishes to alter and has nothing to do with elevated states of consciousness.

In fact, similar results can be obtained using any energy source if the process is carried out a large number of times.

Every object, including human beings, is constantly emitting energy waves of varying intensities that influence the surroundings in general or in specific ways to a smaller or larger extent as the case may be.

This effect is totally expected and usually observed by observant people.

By elevated consciousness is meant a higher frequency of vibration of one's energy field that brings in greater awareness - energy field is conscious, not that consciousness can exist independent of energy, for reasons explained in previous posts.

One has to live the life of a yogi and awaken the higher frequencies in one's own energy field and in one's surrounding energy fields and then one knows via direct experience what the paranormal is all about to whatever degree possible.

A warning: When dealing with human participants in your lab or wherever, please take care of yourself since most of these kinds of people with so-called heightened energies are "possessed" or have in their energy fields a great degree of disorder that affect the energy fields of others who deal with them in subtle and explicit ways.

Your face, talk, movements and if I may add your energy field shows such "contamination" coming from these "possessed" subjects that can affect you and/or your family and friends or whoever you closely interact with at a subliminal level and at a later stage at the level of the waking consciousness.

I repeat, take care and stay safe.

I have seen numerous cases where well-meaning people have been badly affected by coming into intimate contact with those who radiate these highly disordered energies and the adverse symptoms once they begin to manifest in the well-meaning person's life destroys him or creates much misery with medical science being ignorant of the root causes...

Yoga is not what it's made out to be - it's extremely dangerous and in most cases the perverse personality traits of the seekers attract the wrong forces towards themselves....in fact, most of the scriptural prophets that we read about in the texts of all religions and most new age gurus and their followers too are covertly or overtly "insane" or have disordered energy fields due to their negative karma or on account of propitiating the wrong kinds of forces that they mistake as the "divine beings".

I know what I am talking about through direct experiences with the gross and subtle forces in nature and being....

Joel, thank you for sharing your concerns, but please consider that your experiences are unique to you. They are not shared by millions of other people who practice yoga and meditation (including me), and who find it to be a very beneficial practice. In addition, these positive experiences appear to be the norm for most people, as increasingly verified by a substantial body of scientific evidence.

The millions of people who practice yoga are practicing chanting, concentration, body postures (asanas) or deep breathing - all this is not yoga.

Yoga that goes to the Sanskrit root "yuj" exclusively refers to union in consciousness of the subject with object leading to trance (of which there exist 200 odd states), samadhi (stasis which is of varying intensities depending on the degree of trance and the plane of consciousness that one/s awakened consciousness has attained to during the ascent of the awakened consciousness to higher frequencies of the field of conscious energy), self-realization and at the highest stage it involves "jivan mukti" or liberation while in the body by the bringing down into the yogi's body a higher frequency of vibration of the universal conscious-energy field to which the individual's conscious-energy field is yoked with as a result the brought-down superior frequency of energy transforming the yogi's body in radical ways thereby rendering it immortal and invincible as 2 of the many radical consequences.

Well, anyway, I want you to stay safe.

I have some vids of the experiments conducted at IONS and in the majority of cases I have observed that the participants are of the "disordered" type radiating these disordered energies to their surroundings thereby impacting the force fields of people in their vicinity.

Take care, you have been affected by these disordered energies coming from the people you deal with most of whom are "possessed" or have disorder in their energy fields.

There are thousands of published psi studies. To the best of my knowledge the three cases described by Playfair at the above web page are the only known cases of fraud. I see no reason to dwell on a tiny fraction of the literature when those three cases are entirely irrelevant from an evidential point of view.

In a previous post, you said, pertaining to theories of psi: " I would not have thought we were as close to such a theory even a few months ago. But there are new developments under way that look more promising than anything I've previously seen."

What theoretical developments are you alluding to? I would very much appreciate it if you could point me in the direction as to where I could learn more about these budding theories.

Every so often, I scour the net (e.g., online databases, scientific journals - the usual places) to update myself on the state of psi research. However, I can't say I can call to mind any recent theory proposals by researchers in the field...(Dick Bierman's CIRTS, Tressoldi's Remote State Preparation are the most recent papers on theory I can recall).

Are you SURE (YES/NO) to take the Russel&Targ-paper (1974, Nature: Targ & Puthoff (1974). Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding; http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/Targ1974Nature.pdf), where the famous trickster Uri Geller was tested, as a proof for PSI and other para-stuff?

And what about the "work" of the esoteric megaguru and conspiration theorist (regarding zero point energy) Rupert Sheldrake.

I am searching the web for evidence of para/psi etc, but I have never found any non-ridiculous sources.

> Are you SURE (YES/NO) to take the Russel&Targ-paper (1974, Nature: Targ & Puthoff (1974).

YES. Read the paper more carefully.

> And what about the "work" of the esoteric megaguru and conspiration theorist (regarding zero point energy) Rupert Sheldrake.

I don't know what you are reading, but the Rupert Sheldrake I know is neither a "megaguru" or "conspiration" theorist.

> I am searching the web for evidence of para/psi etc, but I have never found any non-ridiculous sources.

Then either you are not looking very hard, or your a priori expectations are prohibiting you from fairly assessing what you are reading, or you may have the requisite training to appreciate what you are reading. There are plenty of good resources, including those on my "Evidence" page.

Well, i have read the paper on Uri Geller - and also i know what Randi has to say about him.

i dare to say that all about Targ, Puthoff, SRI, PEAR is not valid research OR it is valid research without any positive outcome.

if you watch youtube-videos of Sheldrake, (10 problems of science, etc), you will find out that Shaeldrake is an anti-scientist! I cannot take him serious. He says, eg, that the speed of light is changing over the years - and so are other "constsnts" of nature. He _is_ a conspiration theorist, because he believes in the possible useage of _zero point energy_. Are you believing in those perpetuum mobiles, Sir?

Sir, can you please tell me your opinion on the world-wide sceptics movement?

Many thanks, a sceptic.

the positive thing about a sceptic is that he is willing to believe everything - and then asks for a proof! :)

Ok, I see, I have entered a Forum of believers. No problem - I also believe. I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ramen.

Thanks for the links, anyway; but would you plese answer me the questions, whether you personally believe in the usage of zero point energy (just like the conspiration theorist Sheldrake), whether you think that speed of light and other "constants" is changing (as the consp.th. Sheldrake) and i'd like to hear your personal opinion on sceptics like James Randi!

OK, let us continue ....

Let us please contenrate on a certain topic of Parapsychology AND ON HARD SCIENCE:

Are you all OK with HARD SCIENCE? Nomore boring and annoying case studies (Blavatsky, Geller, ...), only RCTBD-studies with a large N. Valid application of statistics.

OK so far?

Now I have some questions on the certain topic of parapsy called >>Telekinesis<<.

1) WHO is able to do TK? (as can be found out by using HARD SCIENCE)

1a) All 7 billion people? if yes, then what part of the Body/Mind is responsible for letting this new physical force acting? Which genes are responsible for coding the ability of TK? Why can (almost) nobody do real TK on his free will, then? Can everybody learn to use his hidden potential of TK?

1b) Only some selected humans, ie, media/psychics. DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE IN UBERMAN? Can you tell me names of psychics, which can lift up the green pen on my desk by at least one meter for at least 10 minutes? I can give you GPS-coordinates, etc. Please lift the pen on a certain day at a certain time, which we can negotiate lateron! Is this psychic willing to show me a performance of his abilities, ie, let the pen dance in the air? And i do not want to pay for it! Can this medium come into my flat (i wish i had a lab) for some rigorous testing according to the rules of HARD SCIENCE? Why did this medium not take part in Randis 1 million dollar challenge yet? (or did it just fail?)

2) If there is TK, why has no engineer used this physically proven(?) phenomenon to build any kind of machine?

3) Do animals have the ability of TK? If not, how can you explain using Darwinism that (all/some) humans have it?

4) Why has nobody sold any TK-related machines or teaching-courses officially in the world (I DO NOT MEAN ON IDIOTIC ESOTERIC WEBPAGERS, OK???)

5) When there is TK, is there any valid approach to model it in terms of mathematical formulas? ie, can we have a theory to this theoryless empirism? (if it is an empirism.... ) (AND I DO NOT MEAN EG THE _NOT PHYSICALLY VALID_ THEORY CALLED "WEAK QUANTUM THEORY" (Walach/Von Locadou))

Many thanks for your answeres, both to personal and HARD SCIENCE-questions!

Michael,it's by no means a sign of disrespect,but the opinion of James Randi is irrelevant to the debate when you try to critisize statistical tests with non-statistical methods.I haven's seen any technical papers published by Randi, nor have I seen any technical comments stated by Randi.I am not even sure he knows math and statistics.This is a crucial point.Let alone the fact that the whole argument of yours is based on references to some youtube videos.In stead you should use mathematical arguments to show how the tests violate the law of the large numbers and other laws of statics.You must be very specific.Let me also use some namedropping.Brian Josephson,a Nobel Laureate in phyiscs finds that Sheldrake' research is groundbreaking.Moreover,Sheldrake's ideas on physics come from discussiouns with different prominent physicists.Moreover,my father is a theorical physicist and he finds Sheldrake's ideas on physics to be an interesting set of hypothesis.Speculative but interesting.Lastly,Sheldrake has expressed willingness to debate publicly people uch as Dawkins,Atkins,anyone.They did't even bother to read the papers.How can there be an honest set of discussions then.?

My position on the science of psi research is clearly stated in my interviews, articles and books.In sum, I believe in what is empirically verifiable using the most rigorous tools and techniques of science.

I'm not interested in trying to convince anyone of anything, especially not those so-called "skeptics" who are unwilling or unable to read and understand the relevant literature.

Michael,I think I should stress the fact that even if someone wins Randi's challenge,it won't be a proof.I think that becomes obvious if you understand the axioms of statistics.The evidence can only be provided through the HARD Science of statistics.If you can't refute the math, you can't refute anything.Case closed.Unless,of course your apriori claim(belief) is that of removal of the possibility of psi from the pool of live options.When some hypothesis can be tested,it must be tested.It might be of course that you are against such experiments for political reasons(e.g.the spread of religious dogmatism).But I see no reasons how such experiments contradict atheism and if you think that they contradict the laws of physics,then you know more about physics and neurobiology that anyone in the world.

Regarding psi effects, they are heterogenous, but this does not mean they are non-existent. It just means that there are certain factors that produce greater effects than others. Radin stated in his rebuttal of a 2006 critique of PEAR (by the war Dr. Radin, the wrong paper is linked to for this in your evidence page), "Bo¨sch et al. assumed that mental intention acts uniformly on each random bit, regardless of the number of bits generated per sample, the rate at which bits are generated, or the psychological conditions of the task. To illustrate why Bo¨sch et al.’s assumption is fallacious, we provide the following scenarios: Consider that we conduct a study involving 1,000 experienced meditators, each ofwhom is selected on the basis of his or her performance on aprevious, similar PK task. Each participant is asked by a cordial,enthusiastic investigator to engage in a daily intention focusing practice for 4 weeks in preparation for the experiment, in which he or she will be asked to intentionally influence the generation of a single random bit. Participants are told that the outcome of that random decision will determine the outcome of a meaningful bonus, such as winning a scholarship. Now consider a second study in which a bored student investigator indifferently recruits an arbitrarily selected college sophomore, who is asked to mentally influence 1,000 random bits generated in a millisecond, with no feedback of the results and no consequences regardless of the outcome.The physical context of these two studies may be identical,using the same RNG and statistics to evaluate the resulting datasets, each of which consists of a total of 1,000 randomly generatedbits. But it is clear that the psychological contexts differ radically.If we presume that the only important factor in this type ofexperiment is the number of bits generated, then the two studiesshould provide about the same results. But if a significant variable is the amount of time or effort one can apply in focusing mental intention toward each random event, then the former study might result in an effect size orders of magnitude larger than the latter.": http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5362812635600084570&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&sciodt=0,5

Indeed, this is the entire point of Radin's book "Supernormal" - that certain factors facilitate this more than others. PEAR results are variable, but the states of consciousness people like Krishnamurti describe correlate to the periods when they are most efficacious. I excerpt in above comments from an article commenting on all of this as follows: "this excerpt [...] reminds me of Krishnamurti, with his statement "the observer is the observed" - to excerpt from Dossey's article - "Overcoming separateness results in effects that can be measured in the lab. In three decades of experimental research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory, Robert G. Jahn, the former dean of engineering at Princeton, and his colleagues have demonstrated that emotionally bonded couples are uniquely gifted in their mental ability to impart order to strings of random ones and zeros produced by random number generators. Moreover, pairs of emotionally close individuals can mentally exchange information remotely, even when separated at continental or global distances. Summing up how it happens, Jahn says, “[The] successful strategy… involves some blurring of identities between operator and machine, or between percipient [sic] and agent [receiver and sender]. And, of course, this is also the recipe for any form of love: the surrender of self-centered interests of the partners in favor of the pair.”63 Put simply, love can change the state of the physical world.""

"My position on the science of psi research is clearly stated in my interviews, articles and books"

Isnt there a public source (like Wikipedia) on the true successes of PSI - with true I mean such effects, which have lead to the development of a PSI-machine or a PSI-course for everybody to become a PSI-medium (non-esoteric please!!) or a publicly available PSI-Theory consistent with Big Bang and Darwin?

I am not going to buy your books - sorry. This is just a form of secret knowledge - esoterics:) I would buy your books, all of them, as soon as you have lifted my left arm on my command! As soon as you write me meials in which you tell me waht i was thinking 3 minutes ago!

"In sum, I believe in what is empirically verifiable using the most rigorous tools and techniques of science"

You are free to believe what you like! But for science (is parapsy a real science???) believe is totally irrelevant, as you might know...

"I'm not interested in trying to convince anyone of anything, especially not those so-called "skeptics" who are unwilling or unable to read and understand the relevant literature"

You must not convince me - i will be convinced automatically, as soon as you lift my left hand at a given date/time! :)

I will be automatically convinced, as soon as there is a public available bigbang/Drawin-compatible theory of PSI, which everybody is able to access and test!

Best & Ramen

PS: I would be very very glad if you would answer my scientific questions from the postings above. I have 1 more question: Could it be that Wikipedia has conspired against you ;)

Sorry, i am being sarcastic, but ...

PPS: Woooow, you are not only on the side of Sheldrake, you are also doing stuff with Deepak Chopra (http://www.amazon.de/Supernormal-Science-Evidence-Extraordinary-Abilities/dp/030798690X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386324357&sr=8-1&keywords=dean+radin) This is a clear sign of antiscientific paradigm-change-esoteric-conspiracy. Sorry, sarcasm again ....

Michael,as Dean said you do not seem to be interested in a dialogue, rather you embrace the art of disrespect by not paying attention to any objection,ხut I will try for the last time to turn your attention to the fact that there are many ways how these experiments may have absolutely naturalistic explanation.Evolution is a process that occurs in complex nonlinear stochastic dynamic systems such as market economy.Evidence that Dean presents might be indicative of the fact that the process its sheer complexity might be less random and more determenistic than is looks and humans agents as the elements of the process may have indicators on the macro and microscale that present the future course of events in the evolutionary process.How is that not with Darwin.? And again the scientific value of your criticism is zero since you haven't refuted anything. RAMEN

Fortunately people espousing views like Michael J's are a small (albeit loud) minority of both the general public and the scientific community. His use of terms like "FSM", which are popular in the militant atheist movement, raises red flags for me. Indeed, I think the organized skeptical movement is built almost entirely upon a hostility to religion. They take two assumptions to be absolutely true in their rejection of psi, that:

1) Psi implies the existence of non-material souls2) Souls do not exist

According to our modern understanding of physics, 1) may not be true. Psi might still be explained through purely physical effects (via time-symmetric fundamental laws and then limited via entropy, for a technical example). On 2), the skeptics make the mistake of starting from a religious belief and then using that to set limits to science. This is because denying the existence of souls is as much a belief as believing they exist. Taking either assumption as true a priori is not a scientific attitude. If either assumption is wrong, the metaphysical case against psi falls apart.

The tone of this type of skeptic reminds me of young-Earth creationists who claim that all the evidence for the Earth being 4.5 billion years old is either faked or wrong. The arguments of the extreme skeptics seem to be the fundamentalist atheistic equivalent.

I also think another key element of the skeptical movement is an authoritarian attitude. They say that "Science" has proven that psi does not exist; therefore, the general public must be protected from believing in charlatans and superstitions. Thus, the skeptics have recently written an extreme tone into some Wikipedia articles like the Radin and Sheldrake pages. To them, it is about protecting an ignorant public. However, in taking "Science" as a source of authority, they make another mistake. Very few scientists are familiar with parapsychology research and very few of those who are do not believe that something interesting is going on.

The new Kindle book, "PSI Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet," by Craig Weiler, is a very good treatment of the tactics and mindsets of people who think they're acting like rational skeptics, but are sadly mistaken.

I mentioned Rosenthal, who worked in the National Research Council. He argued contrary to Hyman's initial critique of the ganzfeld database. He believed that these experiments were of sound design and exceptional among parapsychology research and that they showed an important effect. He, along with Monica Harris, stated that "The situation for the Ganzfeld domain seems reasonably clear. We feel it would be implausible to entertain the null (that is, comclude the results are due to chance) given the combined p (probability) from these 28 studies. ... When the accuracy rate expected under the null is 1/4, we estimate the obtained accuracy rate to be about 1/3." (Harris, M. & Rosenthal, R. (1988). Human performance research: An overview.Washington, DC: National Academy Press. p. 58 - cited by Chris Carter, a defender of this field, on p. 87 of his article "Persistent Denial: A Century of Denying the Evidence" in the book "Debating Psychic Experience" (2010))

Carter continues on p. 87, "In other words, Harris and Rosenthal concluded that the ganzfeld results were not simply due to chance, and that the accuracy rate was about 33 percent, when 25 percent would be expected if chance were responsible. Incredibly, the committee chair John Swets phoned Rosenthal and asked him to withdraw the section of his report that was favorable to parapsychology! Rosenthal refused. In the final NRC report the Harris-Rosenthal paper is cited only in the several sections dealing with the non-psrapsychology topics. There is no mention of it in the section dealing with parapsychology."

The earlier critique I gave above mentioning Rosenthal also notes, "in his Ganzfeld critique, Hyman conducted a factor analysis in order to study the effect of flaws. Saunders (1985) discovered important errors in Hyman’s analysis and demonstrated that Hyman’s findings were meaningless."

This situation - shown by the omission of Rosenthal's work - is not unique in official assessments of government research of this field - for instance, the mainstream media attacked and discredited the US remote viewing program, but there is an incredible discrepancy between that attack and the statements of former president Jimmy Carter on the very high accuracy of one participant in the program as presented here:http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=5187

These discrepancies open up conspiracy theory explanations - and rather than thinking that a rejection of psi shown to be illegitimate by these facts is based on materialist bias - I think instead that it is rejected because of its ramifications for human potential.

There has been other government persecution of people putting forth other points related to esoteric evolution like Wilhelm Reich - the following article disputes the entire basis of the attack on him, and demonstrates replication of all his major experiments: http://www.academia.edu/3677461/In_Defense_of_Wilhelm_Reich_An_Open_Response_to_Nature_and_the_Scientific_Medical_Community

Unfortunately much organized skepticism helps to foster this - acting as a throwback in the continuing development of humanity.

Ben, I don't have pdfs of the articles you cite, but the links you provide are a good resource for those who are interested.

Most of us now have the expectation that information should be instantly available for free, and indeed it would be very nice if the entire scholarly and scientific literature on psi were available to everyone. But besides possibly violating some copyright restrictions, to make this happen would require a great deal of time and money.

I am slowly adding papers to my collection as time allows, but I have many other higher priority demands. So maintaining my website is just a hobby.

P.S. - some in the organized skepticism movement don't like Stapp - probably because he has argued that Quantum interactive dualism is an alternative to materialism: http://exordio.qfb.umich.mx/archivos%20pdf%20de%20trabajo%20umsnh/aphilosofia/QID%20muy%20bueno.pdfThus the "rational wiki" "non-materialistic neuroscience" article cites a "rebuttal" to Stapp by RF Streater. This "rebuttal" is itself spurious, and is refuted by Stapp here: http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/RTS.docCompare the rational wiki article to the following paper by Stapp and Schwartz: http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/PTRS.pdfThat work of Schwartz and Stapp, and your ESP work is powerful, but in addition, the following items falsify arguments of traditional materialistic neuroscience proponents:1) The van Lommel citation given above.2) Terminal lucidity - I have seen skeptics attempt to argue against this on a forum, but their arguments are, in my view, invalid - recall that we have a transformation in consciousness from a degenerate state to a lucid state in this case: http://deanradin.com/evidence/Nahm2011.pdf3) In that vein, see the following article on a man acquiring previously non-existent artistic talents after a stroke, supporting the filter model of consciousness: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1190002/Masterstroke-Man-draw-stickmen-wakes-life-saving-brain-surgery--artist.html4) Here is a New Scientist story about a man with an almost non-existent brain, who nevertheless had a normal life: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html

All of this is evidence in support of such an interactionist hypothesis, countering arguments levied against it. This makes the hypothesis put forth in "Irreducible Mind" more probable than the alternatives. Skeptics have focused on criticisms of "Irreducible Mind", but have not focused on the counters to those criticisms:

I concur with the poster above that atheists seem to not like this because they fear it will bring back religion. But rather than stonewalling human potential, why don't they simply point out that the traditional religions are internally contradictory

There are some new developments that would seem others have cited Nature papers like "An Experimental Test of Non-Local Realism", as interpreted by prof. Richard Cohn-Henry, author of the Nature paper "Living in a Mental World", argue that based on current knowledge, a theistic view of our existence is the only rational alternative to solipsism: http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.htmlThe following video is from a physics student exploring these arguments further, and deriving Whiteheadian panentheism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfdMdbSnNSwPerhaps, if some of this other "paranormal" (but normal now that we are beginning to see a theoretical context) stuff is true, we might go beyond that - perhaps we might have something like the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. But that is all that we could logically derive from this - something extremely generic, perhaps with mystical components, that are also extremely generic. It would not logically imply all the arbitrary destructive elements of the traditional religions.

Regarding rebuttals to criticisms of Irreducible Mind - I forgot to add the link, which is this - http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.5406/amerjpsyc.124.1.0111?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102866149803

Critics of interactionism claim that it violates conservation of energy, but the authors of the book have countered this, citing Stapp to this effect, whose work, as shown above, can also be used to support the other phenomena discussed: http://tinyurl.com/omf426b

The bibliography of Irreducible mind is extensive, and includes the following citations of sources rebutting C.E.M. Hansel, as I have already shown you: http://tinyurl.com/l85umwe

Michael Jachan continues to send silly comments, which I will not allow.

Michael, this is not a public forum. It's my private blog, and as such I post items that I think are interesting. I encourage constructive criticism and serious discussions. I do not allow offensive, willfully ignorant or stupidly aggressive remarks. Scientific discourse needs far more humility in my opinion, not more arrogance.

Ben: Here are some additional replications (that I know of) of Bem's "feeling the future" paradigm. The studies listed below all show evidence for psi, and were conducted around the same time or after Bem 2011 - i.e., so they can be considered "replicatory" in nature (there are, of course, several other conceptually similar studies conducted prior to Bem's paper).

Batthyany, A. (2010). Retrocausal Habituation and Induction of Boredom: A Successful Replication of Bem (2010; Studies 5 and 7). Social Science Research Network, Working Paper Series.

Parker, A., & Sjödén, B. (2010). Do some of us habituate to future emotional events? Journal of Parapsychology, 74, 99–115.

as you have probably inferred by now, what I am trying to do with this thread is create a resource where skeptical objections are answered - in order to complement the database you have presented, so as to encourage more research into this - not necessarily by people in the organized skepticism movement, but by research scientists who might otherwise help in theoretically and otherwise furthering this research, were it not for the organized campaign against it. Many skeptics seem to living in an island referencing others who reference others, so it is important to ascertain the validity of the original sources informing their position. They might continue to reference these sources, but as a result of this dialogue, we will know that their Some of this has already been accomplished.

In that vein, I have 2 questions:1) I have given above an example of a Daryl Bem "feeling the future" replication. Are you aware of others? [UPDATE: I sent an email to Bem, and he has replied with a message sent to both you and I. What is the correct way to cite what he has given us on this blog?]

2) Hyman has been partially dealt with, but Alcock is important currently to deal with. Please pay attention to the commentary occurring after the word "finally", later given, after which an excerpt from a wikipedia article is given. A key argument of his is that positive parapsychological results are not replicated by mainstream scientists. There are several points I have already discovered - already you have noted above, and here: http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-noteworthy-books.html?showComment=1176769140000&m=1#c6369262036259782915

That some of his commentary is fictitious.

a) here you discussed in depth the I.J. Good commentary, and later how Alcock omits from his discussion of "failed" replications of psi by mainstream scientists, a positive ganzfeld replication by mainstream scientists, and you give commentary on the nature of this replication: http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2007/04/more-lunacy-not.html?showComment=1175950020000#c8022321508013074584

b) In "Give the Null Hypothesis A chance", Alcock states, "[Stanley] Jeffers stands in lonely company as one of the very few neutral scientists who have empirically investigated the existence of psi phenomena". Alcock then proceeds to discuss Jeffers' failures to demonstrate a robust effect in efforts to replicate PEAR micro-PK data. But in this article, co-authored by Jeffers, there is a demonstration of a robust micro-pk effect: https://web.archive.org/web/20071021213356/http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/pdf/17.4_freedman_etal.pdf

[are you aware of any other replications from Jeffers? other robust replications outside of PEAR?]

Finally, the wikipedia article on Alcock cites what may be the most damning argument against PEAR - "In a systematic review of all parapsychological research involving random event generators, several important methodological problems became evident, and these problems were of such a serious nature that one could not have any confidence in the results and conclusions of the various studies. Much of that research was carried out in the Princeton University Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory of Robert Jahn, then Dean of that university's Engineering faculty. In addition to these serious methodological concerns, came the finding that if one were to remove the data related to one particular participant, the results of the study were no longer statistically significant. Moreover, the fact that the participant was the individual who set up and oversaw the research for Dr. Jahn naturally rang alarm bells."

Regarding the research of Daryl Bem, a meta-analysis of all known implicit precognition studies is presently under review for publication, but because it is not yet published the details cannot be made public. What can be reported at this point is that over 80 replication experiments have been reported by some 30 labs in 13 countries, and the statistical results show to a high degree of confidence that the effect is independently repeatable.

Beyond this teaser everyone will just have to wait for the publication to appear in a journal. When it does appear it is likely to raise a few eyebrows because it forcefully counters the assertion that "this claim isn't true because it can't be repeated!" It will be interesting to see how the mainstream press handles this.

I am "open" mainstream public. I'm teetering on the fence and landing on your side, sometimes, then staying on the fence thinking. What am I waiting for? The skeptics seem to be a waka-doos. It is much more interesting to find out about folks like me - - why it is so hard for us?

All of Alcock's critiques have been answered by the PEAR staff, including the statement that "if one were to remove the data related to one particular participant, the results of the study were no longer statistically significant." That claim is false, as is the assertion of "serious methodological concerns." As Robert Jahn writes in this article:

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_05_2_jahn.pdf

"Systematic anomalous deviations of the output distribution means of such devices can be replicably achieved by a large number of common human operators."

Mindy, one of the reasons that it's so difficult for someone on the fence to simply decide if psi exists or not (that is the key issue for many) is the confusion created by so-called skeptics. Most of the oft-repeated assertions by skeptics are flatly and demonstrably false (these include issues about repeatability, statistical methods, methodological adequacy, fraud, etc.). The few remaining valid criticisms can be applied to virtually any area of science, and are illegitimately applied just to psi research.

In addition, those who loudly shout for PROOF do not appreciate that empirical science is not about proving anything. It's about providing evidence with various degrees of confidence. The other problem is that these same folks confuse entertainment with reality. That is, they seem to think that psi research is like the psychic "powers" portrayed on TV shows and the movies. Of course reality isn't like the movies. The empirical evidence tells us that psi exists to very high levels of confidence, but among average people it is typically weak and unreliable. That means we need lots of repeated trials and statistics to demonstrate it.

For those who don't understand these basic research methods, this type of evidence isn't very convincing. But for those who do understand, the level of evidence today is very persuasive.

In 2003, Bem presented preliminary data for this paradigm that would later be subsumed in his now infamously controversial 2011 publication, under "Experiment 5". The latter citation above by Savva et al. was a replication of this.

In sum, I have been able to locate 8 additional Bem replications, conducted by 7 independent researchers/labs, and all of which all demonstrate evidence for psi. (There are, of course, numerous other conceptually similar implicit precognition studies; they are currently under meta-analytic review, according to Dean).

Since it cropped up again, I'm gonna add my two cents on the controversy surrounding Bem's recent work. (And considering that this is Dean's blog, I will exercise a polite tone which, for me, is quite difficult to do when discussing the pseudo-skepticism that denigrates the integrity of science.)

The "skeptical" assertion abounding on the internet is that "there are no positive replications of Bem 2011". If one peruses any popular science news source, he or she would be under the impression that the only Bem (2011) replication attempts are those by Galak et al. and Ritchie, Wiseman, and French - both of which are "failures". This is utterly false, as I have shown in this and my previous comment not by argument, but by simply presenting all the facts. That information alone - i.e., the full picture regarding Bem replication attempts - is sufficient to show that internet "skeptics" are propagating an extremely biased and fallacious view.

Regarding the aforementioned replication failures: The vast majority of the data presented in Galak et al. were obtained from tests run online - only about 12% of the data comes from tests run in the lab. Steve Volk notes the following (http://www.dailygrail.com/Mind-Mysteries/2012/8/Not-Feeling-the-Future-New-Bem-Replication-Fails-Find-Evidence-Psi):

"This online aspect brings in a number of points of failure, from inattentiveness and distraction, right through to unintentional (by knowing about and thus being prepared for the 'surprise' test at the end) or intentional sabotage - it's worth noting that the availability of the online test was passed around on skeptical forums such as the JREF and Rational Skepticism. Bem himself has criticized a previous paper from Galak et al. on this very point, saying when you do the test online, 'you lose total control over it'. Interestingly, two of the three lab-based experiments done by the researchers had significantly lower p-values (p=0.04 and p=0.10) than the other tests."

Ritchie, Wiseman and French are all renowned self-proclaimed "skeptics", unashamedly biased against psi. An argument can be made that a genuine experimenter effect may have influenced their work here - be it an ordinary (psychological) or non-ordinary (psi-related) experiment effect. Experimenter effects are well known to both mainstream behavioral and psi researchers ("ordinary" experimenter effects are widely accepted). Such putative experimenter effects are, in fact, particularly relevant to the Bem controversy. Studies involving Wiseman himself have documented experimenter effects (Wiseman & Schlitz, 1997, 1998, and Schlitz, Wiseman, Watt & Radin, 2006). Furthermore, research involving Bem's very paradigm have demonstrated an experimenter effect (Subbotsky, 2012).

The wikipedia coverage on parapsychology is so bad that they claim in the page on Rhine that it claims Rhine's results have never been replicated, when, as you note in your response to Alcock re. Bem above, Rhine listed replications and responded to criticisms in his 1940 book.

The wiki coverage of parapsychology is so bad that in the parapsychology article, they cite as of today, in reference 84, the work of Ulrich Mohrhoff, claiming it precludes psi, when in fact that very reference argues the opposite of what they claim, and Mohrhoff is the very first commenter to this page!

I imagine that those in charge of WP are aware that it has some serious editorial problems, but I also imagine that they figure it is good enough and in any case, like gigantic banks or bloated bureaucracies, it has become too big to fail.

This is the nightmare that George Orwell and others were trying to warn us about. When a widely used encyclopedia tells us facts that are demonstrably false, we have a problem.

The so-called skeptics who are so energetically rewriting history are ironically causing far more harm to the scientific enterprise than good. These are the same folks who, in another century, would have been obsequious servants of the Inquisition.

Some people says when the ones who don't believe in paranormal phenomena run laboratories devoted to find the evidences of the existence of paranormal phenomena, they yield the negative experiment results which do not favour the existence of paranormal phenomena. And the ones who believe in paranormal phenomena says this is a objective law.

Dr Dean, if the following prediction is right, can telepathy suggest that there is a wormhole between 2 human beings' brains? can precognition suggest that there is a wormhole between the human brains and the future information? can clairvoyance suggest that there is a wormhole between human brains and the distant target?

Yes, for so many skeptics, "proof" does not exist because of the James Randi million dollar challenge - but this is a dishonest public relations scheme. Dennis Rawlins has quoted Randi as follows - "He assured me how cautious he was in the testing for his well-publicized $ 10,000 prize for proof of psychic abilities (for which he acts as policeman, judge and jury -- and thus never has supported my idea of neutral judgment of CSICOP tests. "I always have an out," he said.": http://www.psicounsel.com/starbaby.html

Randi has attempted to say Rawlins was quoting out of context, but other incidents call his intellectual honesty into question - from the following - footnote 25: http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/CSICOPoverview.htm"25 Randi’s antics should have come as no surprise to members of CSICOP because he has engaged in similar behavior in relation to psi research. Krippner (1977), Rao (1984), Targ and Puthoff (1977, pp. 182-186), and Tart (1982b) have all documented glaring errors of Randi. Dennis Stillings has demonstrated that “Randi is capable of gross distortion of facts” (Truzzi, 1987, p. 89). Randi has been quoted as saying, “I always have an out” with regard to his $10,000 challenge (Rawlins, 1981, p. 89). Puthoff and Targ (1977) documented a number of mistakes. In a published, handwritten, signed letter, Randi replied offering $1,000 if any claimed error could be demonstrated (see Fuller, 1979). Fuller proved Randi wrong. In a rejoinder to Puthoff and Targ (1977), Randi reversed himself (for a clear example, see point number 15 in Randi, 1982, p. 223). Randi should have paid the $1,000, but he never did."

Moreover, I have here demonstrated actual chicanery on the part of the JREF: http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2013/04/show-me-evidence.html?showComment=1386267603458#c9012372150767499963

Moreover, if I can recall correctly, I have heard Sheldrake insinuate that publicity rights are handed over to the JREF if an applicant succeeds - they loose an element of autonomy in signing up for it. I will have to verify this, but Sheldrake has written here about Randi's lying: http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Mediaskeptics/Randi_dogs.html

People who don't believe in psi hardly ever conduct psi experiments, and the few who do hardly ever publish the details, so these claims are difficult to evaluate. However, as I wrote in Entangled Minds:

Consider the case of Stanley Jeffers, a skeptical physicist from York University. In 1992, Jeffers tried to repeat PK experiments similar to those reported by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. He wasn’t successful. His skepticism was fueled by another PK study he reported in 1998, which also failed. Then, in 2003 Jeffers coauthored a third study in which he finally reported a repeatable, significant PK effect. So, can skeptics produce successful experiments? Yes, they can.

Or as I wrote in Supernormal:

Two psychologists who explicitly disavowed belief in what they called “psychic powers,” Edward Delgado-Romero from the University of Georgia and George Howard from the University of Notre Dame, attempted to replicate the ganzfeld telepathy experiment using the method described [in the book]. They published their results in the journal Humanistic Psychologist. They wrote: "After eight studies, we had an overall hit rate of 32% (which agrees with the positive meta- analyses) and, in fact, our hit rate was also statistically significant ...."

So there is evidence that people who explicitly disavow any belief in psi can indeed produce positive results.

The flipside is also true. Those who do believe in psi do not always get positive results. E.g., in this study: http://deanradin.com/evidence/Schlitz2012.pdf, we did not observe primary evidence for distant healing effects.

Thy following from Playfair, when taken in combination with the above, pretty much discredits CSICOP: http://www.uri-geller.com/geller-effect/tge14.htm

Guy Lyon Playfair here states, "In an exchange of letters with Henry Bauer, editor of the excellent Journal of Scientific Exploration, Kendrick Frazier, editor of the Skeptical Inquirer has candidly admitted that (in Bauer's words) "the magazine's purpose is not to consider what the best evidence for anmalous [sic] claims might be but to argue against them". (JSE, vol. 3 no. 1, 1989).": http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Secretskeptics/index.html

I think it is telling that according to Massimo Pigliucci, organized skepticism is a movement with the aim of "debunking paranormal claims": http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/05/pz-myers-quits-skeptic-movement-should.html

So, by his own admission, it cannot be considered an objective arbiter of the facts.

That's a good question. The scientific study about psi is not about "proof." All that empiricism can do is provide various degrees of confidence in measurements and observations. My assessment of the cumulative evidence is that it provides high confidence that psi exists. Others have reached this same conclusion.

This is important because the only way we can know about the nature of reality, and ultimately about ourselves, is through our consciousness. Psi provides a key anomaly that tells us that prevailing (orthodox scientific) ideas about consciousness are incomplete. That's why it's important to study. What has science overlooked?

Beyond this, there are also pragmatic reasons for better understanding the full range of human potentials.

It's so obvious that minds are entangled. Who hasn't seen how they often encounter a close friend often-even when they wish they could see them then they run into them. Or how they never see someone they don't like? Many skeptics but not all are trolls. That is they are trouble causers for that reason only. The more you argue with them the more they like it.

I will make more commentary on other issues for a while, butfor now, I's like to note that David Leiter, in the JSE, Vol. 16:1, pp. 125-128,in an article entitled "The Pathology of Organized Skepticism",gives interesting commentary: http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_16_1_leiter.pdf

"... we are convinced that the case for psi phenomena has already been made ..."

The statement above has just been published in an open letter in the journal "Frontiers in Human Neuroscience". It has been signed by 91 professional researchers, most of them holding professorial tenures, the other senior research positions.

>I understand the arguments and am familiar with the literature on psi and survival, and I am not yet convinced of survival of the personality.

I would add that it might be something akin to the Buddhist beliefs. That consciousness continues, but personality is illusionary and does not survive. As is quite obvious, awareness and personality are not the same thing.

It all depends what you mean by "personality". Personal identity doesn't even survive the act of mindful presence. In perfect presence thereby is no past and no memory, nor any mind-related projections into imagined futures. Nor is there any meaningful story to attach meaning or identity to. Of course the capacity for those things is retained. But deep states of presence reveal an entirely different "I". People who experience NDEs - such as the remarkable Anita Moorjani case - often report a sense of self that is consistent with this deep presence.

> It all depends what you mean by "personality". Personal identity doesn't even survive the act of mindful presence. In perfect presence thereby is no past and no memory, nor any mind-related projections into imagined futures. Nor is there any meaningful story to attach meaning or identity to. Of course the capacity for those things is retained. But deep states of presence reveal an entirely different "I". People who experience NDEs - such as the remarkable Anita Moorjani case - often report a sense of self that is consistent with this deep presence.

I don't find NDE's to be all that convincing to be honest. Only a few people seem to have them, there are those who have been physically dead for tens of hours and reported nothing. I do, however, find the Stevenson cases as far more compelling, because there is a lot more corroborating evidence.

Simon, I'm simply saying that this aspect of NDEs aligns with my own common experience of deep presence. I don't base my understanding on the NDEs - it's the other way round. In deep presence there is nothing to attach identity to, no past and no future. In fact in deep presence there is no real mind in the sense of logical/analytical thought and you cannot "know" "who I am". Not knowing replaces knowing as we normally think of it. I'm not talking about meditation in the common sense of the word. Deep presence occurs when you bring the mind fully into silent presence wherever you are, and into relationship with whatever you find yourself to be with.

Much of what occurs in NDEs in similar to deep presence and many of the cognitive experinces are also consistent with many of my own psychic experience, so I have no problem seeing them as a valid expression of consciousness - and reflective of an important aspect of who we are.

I'm not denying your experience, Marcus. However, as someone who has never felt what you have felt, I can't really imagine it.

On a different note, this is is question to anyone, but do skeptics, with exception to Susan Blackmore and perhaps Sam Harris, actually meditate at all? Do Joe Coyne, PZ Meyers, Shermer, Randi, Radford, and their thousands of fans actually sit down and meditate?

See also Greyson's comment on "Surge of neurophysiological activity in the dying brain": http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/NDE71surge-PNAS.pdf

For the response of Greyson to some NDE skepticism, see:1) ‘There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences’ revisited: comment on Mobbs and Watt: http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/NDE%2068.pdf2) Response to “Some Basic Problems with the Term ‘Near-Death Experience’”: http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/Engmann-JNDS.pdf3) Visualizing Out-of-Body Experience in the Brain: http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/NDE58.pdf4) References to rebuttals of Keith Augustine have been given above, however, regarding the "paranormal perception" aspect, see: http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/Augustine-1-JNDS.pdf, http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/greyson-publications/RE%20to%20Augustins%20Does%20Paranormal%20Perception%20Occur%20in%20NDE.pdf

Greyson's "Seeing dead people not known to have died: “Peak in Darien” experiences" is highly compelling: http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/Greyson2010.pdf

But in particular, the following points, shown by Dr. Jeffrey Long, NDE researcher, severely challenge materialist explanations and seem to indicate the existence of a soul - as follows - these are his “9 lines of evidence” - point 3 is particularly important: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/717604#1The 9 Lines of Evidence from Evidence of the Afterlife1. Crystal-clear consciousness. The level of consciousness and alertness during NDEs is usually greater than that experienced in everyday life, even though NDEs generally occur when a person is unconscious or clinically dead [flatline EEG]. In addition, the elements in NDEs generally follow the same consistent and logical order in all age groups and cultures.2. Realistic out-of-body experiences. Out-of-body experiences are among the most common elements of NDEs, and what is seen or heard is almost always realistic. Even if out-of-body-experience observations include events that occur far from the physical body, and far from any possible sensory awareness of the patient, they are almost always confirmed to be completely accurate.3. Heightened senses. Heightened senses are reported by most people who have experienced NDEs, and normal or supernormal vision has occurred in those with significantly impaired vision, and even legal blindness. Several people who have been totally blind since birth have reported highly visual NDEs.4. Consciousness during anesthesia. Many NDEs occur while a person is under general anesthesia, at a time when any conscious experience should be impossible. Although there is speculation that these NDEs are the result of too little anesthesia, some result from anesthesia overdose.5. Perfect playback. Life reviews in NDEs include real events that took place in the lives of those having the experience, even if the events were forgotten or happened before the person was old enough to remember.6. Family reunions. During a NDE, the people encountered are virtually always deceased, and are usually relatives of the person having the NDE; sometimes they are even relatives who died before the patient was born.7. Children's experiences. The NDEs of children, including children who are too young to have developed concepts of death, religion, or NDEs, are essentially identical to those of older children and adults.

8. Worldwide consistency. NDEs appear remarkably consistent around the world, and across many different religions and cultures. NDEs in non-Western countries are incredibly similar to those that occur in Western countries.9. Aftereffects. It is common for people to experience major life changes after having NDEs. These aftereffects are often powerful, lasting, and life-enhancing, and the changes generally follow a consistent pattern.

The other indicator for a soul would be an underlying unity of consciousness - for this, and a rebuttal to competing ideas ("split-brain" objections, etc.) see "Irreducible Mind" ch. 5, "Automatism and Secondary Centers of Consciousness": http://books.google.com/books?id=6gS_LcIjFMsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=irreducible+mind&hl=en&sa=X&ei=d1cqU8LoJsfsoAShpoHgDw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=irreducible%20mind&f=false

So in light of all this, the "god helmet" attempt to explain away NDEs by Persinger is seen to be misguided. Persinger is challenged in "Irreducible Mind" (Paperback, 2010), p. 531-534. p. 534n30, in particular, states, "these simulation results render it exceedingly unlikely, in our opinion, that "God experiences" can be induced by weak impressed magnetic fields of the sort applied by Persinger (1999, 2001). The experiences Persinger reports are at best distantly related to the genuinely mystical, and they appear highly vulnerable to distortion by subject expectancies and demand characteristics created by his experimental conditions. Our long-standing suspicions in this regard have recently been confirmed by the failure of an attempt to replicate his findings using his own apparatus under strictly double blind conditions (Granqvist et al., 2005). More generally, the numerous papers and books in which Persinger claimed to explain all sorts of supernormal activity in terms of largely hypothetical patterns of temporal lobe activity seem to us of little scientific value (see also Chapter 6, and Horgan, 2003, pp. 91-105)"In chapter 6 of "Irreducible Mind", pp. 382-383, we find that "Persinger (1989) has also claimed that "a vast clinical and surgical literature...indicates that floating and rising sensations, OBEs, personally profound mystical and religious encounters, visual and auditory experiences, and dream-like sequences are evoked, usually as single events, by electrical stimulation of deep, mesiobasal temporal lobe structures" (p. 234). His sole reference for this strong claim is a paper by Stevens (1982). That paper, however, is confined entirely to descriptions of certain physiological observations made in studies of epileptic patients, and it contains no mention of any subjective experiences or of electrical stimulation studies, much less of a "vast clinical and surgical literature" supporting Persinger's claim. Persinger goes on to claim that, using weak transcranial magnetic stimulation, he and his colleagues have produced "all of the major elements of the NDE, including out-of body experiences, floating, being pulled towards a light, hearing strange music, and profound meaningful experiences." However, we have been unable to find phenomenological descriptions of the experiences of his subjects adequate to support this claim, and the brief descriptions that he does provide in fact again bear little resemblances to NDEs (e.g. Persinger, 1994, pp. 284-285).The discrepancy between Persinger's claim to have stimulated NDEs and the actual data from his studies is particularly obvious in Persinger (1999). In one study participants reported their experiences by completing a "debriefing questionnaire" consisting of 19 items that Persinger calls "the classic types of experiences associated with these experiments" (p. 96). Nearly all of these items, however, are completely unlike typical features of an NDE, and the few that might be said to resemble them ("I felt the presence of someone"; felt as if I left my body"; "I experienced thoughts from childhood") are too vague to be able to judge their similarity to what is experienced during an NDE. In two tables, however, Persinger gives verbatim descriptions made by two participants during the stimulation experiment (pp. 97-98). Again, neither of these descriptions resembles an NDE. Isolated elements might seem vaguely similar to an NDE [...]; but without much detailed description, the claimed similarity between NDEs and experiences induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation is clearly premature at best."

Persinger did however provide positive evidence for psi-neuroimaging studies that is corroborated by others. I will get to those of others and then get to his:skeptics" like to cite Moulton & Kosslyn (2008) "Using neuroimaging to resolve the psi debate" (which actually produced a positive result, which the authors dismissed as an artifact). In doing so, they ignore all the positive fMRI studies which have shown an effect - like "Evidence of correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging signals between distant human brains": http://deanradin.com/evidence/StandishfMRI2003.pdf, "Replicable functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of correlated brain signals between physically and sensory isolated subjects.": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16398586, "Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: a functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis.": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16398587, "Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144613/, (from the European Parapsychological Association Convention) "Presentiment in a fMRI experiment with meditators":http://www.uniamsterdam.nl/D.J.Bierman/PUBS/2007/europa2007_bierman.pdf

And the articles of Michael Persinger, when taken in succession, specifically refute claims alleging no psi-effect registered in the brain: (from the journal Brain Research):http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21396353, (from the journal The Open Astronomy Journal): http://benthamscience.com/open/toaaj/articles/V006/10TOAAJ.pdf, (from the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12081299, the article (from the journal of Biophysical chemistry): http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=17181, (from the journal NeuroQuantology): http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/686

Persinger thus believes he has proven ESP, though he frames it with naturalistic explanations (a "more exotic" naturalism), correlating it to EM/Geomagnetic fields, etc. - he interestingly claims that EM smog dampens psi in his "No More Secrets" presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l6VPpDublg - an interesting, very well sourced documentary on the other dangers of EM smog, is "Resonance: Beings of Frequency": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhMFvZFHo2c

Rupert Sheldrake has noted similar obfuscation on the part of Wiseman in his up to date reply to him - http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/wiseman_claim.html with a link (from the bottom of that page) to his response to Wiseman's 2011 paper: http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/Jaytee_experiments.html

However, unlike Hyman and Alcock, I wouldn't state that Wiseman is intellectually dishonest to their level, because, according to Derakshani, he does acknowledge error. Derakshani says, in the aforementioned defense of Ganzfeld, "was shown by statistician Jessica Utts and acknowledged by Wiseman (personal correspondence, July 2011) to have used a flawed estimate of the overall effect size and p-value of the combined results"

Yet he never went public with this revelation, at least to my knowledge - until he does, this is still problematic.

The only major modern skeptical proponent I have not found to be dishonest in this is Chris French (though actually, he is implicated in academic fraud by Bem, per the above). But Chris French defends parapsychology as a science, in opposition to the views of those who engage in obfuscatory measures: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/subjects/psychology/Is_Parapsychology_a_Pseudoscience_French_article.pdf

(It could be argued that modern parapsychology is rather different than its predecessors which involved themselves with physical mediumship, etc, but Charles Richet, in "Thirty Years of Psychical Research", presented a highly scientific and empirical attempt to deal with this also, building on the work of the previous early pioneers, FWH Myers and William Crookes. He is unfortunately smeared currently, as are the others, but for a refutation of the smears with regards to Richet, see "Science and Parascience" by Brian Inglis).

For more regarding the NRC coverup by Hyman and Alcock, and evidence of fraud on the part of Martin Gardner, see: http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2014/02/eileen-garrett-in-wikipedia.html?showComment=1393788173907#c835204673053184997, http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2014/02/eileen-garrett-in-wikipedia.html?showComment=1393798018166#c1576563894148752603

And as for the results of these people, in cases where it is not due to fraudulent obfuscation, keep in mind what Inglis says, in "The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena", p. 35, "That 'psi experimenter-effect' needs to be taken into consideration in trials was demonstrated in a simple but ingenious experiment carried out by G.W. Fisk, a member of the council of the SPR, in the 1950s. He had had encouraging results with the aid of a variant on card (or picture) guessing: he sent out cards with clock faces on them with clock faces on them, in sealed opaque envelopes, inviting percipients to guess the time on each card. Without informing the percipients, Fisk had half of the clock-face times set by Dr. D.J. West, another council member who had tended to be a psi inhibitor in experiments. Although there was no way in which the percipients could have known whether the time was set by Fisk or by West, when the cards were returned it was found that the correct guesses for Fisk's cards were significantly above chance, while those for West's were, with one exception, at the chance level. A follow-up test, with a single percipient, produced the same result." (he delves further into this in "The Hidden Power")

There are so many erroneous attacks in this area and obfuscations - the idea that everything is due to fraud, etc - though a pursuit of the item given above will show fraud on the other side of the debate, and the few instances of fraud in parapsychology were discovered by parapsychologists: http://monkeywah.typepad.com/paranormalia/fraud-in-psi-research.html. Info on fraudulent experimenters like Soal, etc., is given by McLuhan above, but note that, as Brian Josephson stated, (in part), "I.J. Good's review of Radin's survey of the evidence for paranormal phenomena, The Conscious Universe [1], misleads by its selective approach to parapsychological research, combined with claims of error on the author's part that are invalid. As the book indicates, possibilities for fraud and unintentional error are much reduced by present day techniques so that what may or may not have happened in the case of Soal is essentially irrelevant (unless one believes in extensive collusive cheating among apparently reputable individuals, a hypothesis I find implausible). For example, readings are nowadays normally not written down by the experimenter, but recorded and analysed automatically. Such improvements have not made the effects go away, giving one some reason to consider that they are real.": http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/psi/doubtsregood.html

Here is a paper by Brian Josephson, attempting to look at non-locality in biological systems as a means of explaining psi: http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/papers/bell.html

And there is the following popular article overviewing similar ideas - "Unbroken Wholeness: The Emerging View of Human Interconnection" - which cites some interesting surveys as well: http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2812%2900219-4/fulltext

there are relevant experiments in articles like "The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential": http://physicsessays.org/doi/abs/10.4006/1.3029159 The abstract reads: "Einstein‐Podolsky‐Rosen (EPR) correlations between human brains are studied to verify if the brain has a macroscopic quantum component. Pairs of subjects were allowed to interact and were then separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers 14.5 m apart when their EEG activity was registered. Only one subject of each pair was stimulated by 100 flashes. When the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the nonstimulated subject showed “transferred potentials” similar to those evoked in the stimulated subject. Control subjects showed no such transferred potentials. The transferred potentials demonstrate brain‐to‐brain nonlocal EPR correlation between brains, supporting the brain's quantum nature at the macro level."

However the following thesis looking into aspects of this work not covered so far, overviewing work on DMILS, remove viewing, etc - with important rebuttal to Marks and Kamman, etc. - "Is Physicalism "Really" True" by Paul Hamilton Smith: http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/ETD-UT-2009-12-682/SMITH-DISSERTATION.pdf

argues that the parapsychology database challenges the total explanatory power of physicalism - that physics is useful for certain domains, but is incomplete as means of providing full explanations of the world.It disputes, on p. 289, the idea that quantum non-locality can explain psi based on 2 premises:1) Non-locality is acausal, whereas psi is usually causal.2) quantum non-locality is non-information bearing - it dictates that no information is passed by virtue of the entanglement relation. (However, Stapp, in his rebuttal to Streater cited above mentioned information, and Bohm and Hiley mention "active information")(the third argument regarding no macro non-locality has been refuted by Vedral in "Quantifying entanglement in macroscopic systems": , and I have seen references to other literature along these lines: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007APS..MARB33005B - not to say that I am qualified to deal with it, but that quantum effects in macroscopic systems are now mainstream science)

However, the causal vs. acausal point is still problematic. Maybe some of the von Neumann interpretation material of Stapp would be useful here, or a combination of both perspectives would be required to account for the phenomena. It is important to fully modify these theories to fully account for the objection (acausality in non-locality vs. causality in psi).

As for Marks & Kamman, Brian Inglis notes in "The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena", something touched on and further explored in the above thesis, which should be added to the above database in "General Overviews and Critiques" as something exploring what wasn't explored in the references you gave so far. Inglis writes, p. 27, "Puthoff and Targ's description of their trials was published in the Journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1976. In a letter published in Nature (17 August 1978) the psychologists David Marks and Richard Kamman of the University of Otago, New Zealand, claimed that the comparison of the target photographs and the percipients' drawings had not been conducted fully 'blind' as the judges had been given some verbal clues; they added that their own experiments to replicate the results had failed. Replying in Nature with Puthoff and Targ (13 March 1980) Charles Tart, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, who had not been involved in the original trials, described how he had sent the photographs and drawings to a different judge, randomizing them in ways suggested by Marks and Kamman for future trials; and her assessment had revealed similarly significantly positive correlations to those of the earlier judges. (Trials in some other laboratories using the Marks /Kamman protocol have since achieved significantly positive replication). The data, Tart concluded, 'continue to confirm the original conclusion that remote viewing is a viable human perceptual capability'."